7 Sure-Fire Ways to Blow Your AI Budget
CIO, Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026
Isaac Sacolick lists seven mistakes that blow AI budgets, from unmeasured outcomes and late governance to unmonitored agent costs.
In this CIO opinion piece, Isaac Sacolick says consumption-based AI pricing, growing usage and more demanding agent tasks are straining budgets.
The seven mistakes are setting AI strategy without measurable business outcomes, experimenting without governance, judging tokenomics by model cost rather than business value, building agents and AI-generated code without standards, using frontier models for every task, deploying agents without monitoring cost spikes, and skipping change management.
Each section quotes executives from firms such as Verint, Databricks, Teradata, Sonar and Workday and ends with a recommendation.
He concludes that CIOs should set budgets, track costs and measure outcomes as more agents reach production.